What would you do if your role as a leader lead to the accidental death of one of your employees? It’s a scenario that, thankfully, most of us might never have to consider. And yet, for one leader, this was exactly a situation they faced in their career, and what might have been a career-ending moment turned into one that helped this leader to learn how we can achieve extraordinary outcomes simply by caring for those we lead.

The leader in question is Cort Dial, who is also the guest in this episode of my leadership podcast, “Leadership Biz Cafe”. Cort is a former manager and executive who now serves as President of Cort Dial Consulting, where he has worked with executives from Chevron, Intel, U.S. Borax, Disney and Apple.

A few weeks ago, I was the invited guest on CBC Radio’s Daybreak where I shared advice on how to successfully achieve your goals for this year. Now, the start of a new year is typically when most of us make efforts to create goals for what we’d like to achieve over the course of the next 12 months.

But setting goals for what we’d like to achieve is not something that’s exclusive to the start of a new year. Indeed, anytime is a good time to commit to achieving goals that will help you to succeed, prosper, and become a better you.

Of course, leaders are always creating, monitoring, adjusting, and evaluating goals they create for their employees and their organization well beyond the month of January. But how many of us are setting goals for ourselves? Of what we’d like to achieve both for ourselves as well as within ourselves to help those we lead be successful in their collective efforts?

The truth is it’s often easier to set organizational goals than personal leadership goals because with the latter, we’re pretty much dealing with ourselves in terms of making these changes for the better. And sometimes, that can be a pretty big obstacle to overcome.

Granted, there are numerous articles that have been written which share tips on how we can go about achieving our goals. That’s why during this interview on CBC Radio, I wanted to share some lesser known approaches that can amplify our efforts to succeed.

Given how well-received they were, I’d like to share these 3 uncommon strategies for how you can successfully achieve your goals so that, 11 months from now, you can be successful not just in terms of your organization’s goals, but in terms of your personal goals as well. Click here to continue reading »

Or worse yet, have you ever lead a meeting while others quietly asked themselves, “Why am I here?”

If so, my guess is there was one thing missing that could have made a profound difference in how you or others felt about a meeting. Something that not only does away with the ambiguity of why this meeting is taking place but also increases connection, belonging and trust. With one change, you can transform meetings from having low-to-no engagement with ambiguous outcomes into fully transparent, productive collaborations.

How? Begin your next meeting with a statement of intent. It brings clarity to others about “where” you are coming from and what “game” you’re are willing to play. Sharing your intention allows for full transparency rather than leaving others guessing about what we are up to and “why we are here?”

When I suggest making a clear statement of intent, I don’t mean open your next meeting with, “Hello folks, today we are here to talk about the new product launch.” The CEO that I was coaching started a recent meeting that way. As you can guess it did little to move people to the edge of their seats.

The following is a guest piece by Jaime Anderson and Gabor George Burt.

In the beginning, there was humor and there was laughter. And it was good. But then, work became suffocatingly serious. Until now.

There’s an entire branch of social science that studies the psychological and physiological effects of humor and laughter on the brain and the immune system— it’s called gelotology.

Discoveries in this field have demonstrated that humor, laughter and fun releases physical and cognitive tension, which can lead to perceptual flexibility—a required component of creativity, ideation, and problem solving. So to get the most out of innovation processes such as design thinking, truly creative leaders also need to master the social dynamics of… [wait for the punchline}…humor!

But in the world of leadership, humor has typically been typecast as a manifestation of individual personalities and thereby a spontaneous and non-replicable activity. Much less attention has been given to the idea that humor might be acquired, learned and nurtured.

In writing this leadership blog, I’ve had the opportunity to share several personal stories that help to illustrate some key insights into how we can succeed in our role as leaders. So it seems only appropriate to share here what will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of my career – my TEDx talk that I gave on the topic of finding purpose in what we do.

In my TEDx talk, I share two personal stories from my work career that have helped to shape my understanding of not only what it takes to be a successful leader, but what it takes to achieve enduring success, and the motivation to always bring our best to the work we do.

Our sense of purpose is not simply derived by what we do, but by how we choose to view what we do [Share on Twitter].

We all long to feel like we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves; that we understand the impact of our contributions [Share on Twitter].

If we’re not fulfilling our purpose, how can our successes truly matter? Why will we care about these achievements once the glow has faded? [Share on Twitter]

Our real strengths push us to challenge ourselves to do and be better than we are today [Share on Twitter].

Our passion is a reflection of the sense of purpose we gain from the work we do, and the lives we choose to live [Share on Twitter].

The overall mission of TED is to offer “ideas worth spreading”. To that end, I’d like to end my piece with a request. I’d like to ask that you not only watch my TEDx talk, but that you share it with others, either by sharing this blog post or by sharing this link to my TEDx talk on YouTube.

I want to encourage you to share my TEDx talk not just with your work colleagues, but with your family and friends because I truly believe this is an idea that’s not only worth spreading, but can provide immense value to others to understand how they can achieve meaningful and enduring success.